1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to cooling control devices, and in particular, to a cooling control device for controlling the operation of a cooling fan arranged in a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The computer system generates heat with the operation of devices such as CPU and hard disc drive arranged therein. A constant temperature range (rated temperature) is defined to guarantee a satisfactory operation in such system and device, and a cooling fan dedicated to each device and a system shared fan shared by the entire system are generally arranged in the computer system to maintain the temperature inside the system and of each device to the rated temperature.
A method of controlling the operation of the cooling fan for cooling the computer system includes a method of setting a specific rotation number (weighting) on a plurality of cooling fans shared in the computer system and performing the control, and a method of acquiring temperature data from each operation unit of the computer system using a temperature sensor, and controlling the rotation number of the cooling fan according to the temperature data. When cooling a plurality of cooling targets by means of the plurality of cooling fans, a cooling fan control method of controlling the system shared fan and determining the rotation number in accordance with the cooling target having the highest cooling demand in the system is used.
A method of weighing in correspondence to the respective cooling ability of a plurality of cooling device for cooling the cooling target of the computer system, and controlling the cooling operation based on the weight (point) is disclosed (Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 11-40971 (patent document 1).
However, in the cooling fan control method described above, since the entire system is set as the cooling target, more than necessary cooling is performed on the cooling target that does not have a high cooling demand. The power consumption and noise thus becomes larger than necessary.
Similarly, when acquiring the temperature data from each operation unit of the computer system in operation using the temperature sensor, and determining the rotation number of the system shared fan in accordance with the portion having the highest cooling demand in the system, as described above, the power consumption and noise thus becomes larger than necessary.